Turning points
Commentary
In the three texts today hearers meet three classic figures: Abraham, who receives a call of God and gets to respond; Paul, who comments on those who get called and who respond, in the hope that those who read him might find themselves called and in need of response: and Nicodemus, a shadowy figure who never fully emerges from the shadows in the Fourth Gospel text.
We know some outcomes. Abraham believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. He came to a land of promise (though he never "owned" more of it than the grave site of his wife). Paul believed, and found this story, this call, this response. it a life's calling to urge others to depend on the promise of God. But as for Nicodemus? The Fourth Gospel gives us excerpts of Jesus' words, but nothing more of Nicodemus, after his opening comment and question. Jesus speaks, and then we read only, "After this Jesus and his disciples went ...."
Did Nicodemus respond? Did he come to faith? What did he think after he went back into the shadows and then to the workaday world? Assume that this story is told to promote faith and questioning in our own time. Nicodemus becomes easier to identify with than Abraham and Paul, heroes of faith in the story of faith.
Nicodemus is left with the question: Who is this God who sends a Son, who announces a kingdom, who wants us to be born "from above," who wants to save the world and not condemn it? Whoever walks away with messages based on any of the three of these texts is supposed to be free from reliance on what she or he had invented and called a kingdom, of "works" that are never enough. Free from, yes. But, more important, free for the life God lets unfold.
Grist For The Mill
Genesis 12:1-4a
History has had room and time for only a few turning points. The invention of agriculture, of the village, of modern industrialism would count as three of these. Yet they were processes more than events. No one woke up one day and said, "Today we invented agriculture," or "Tomorrow let's produce industrialism."
So far as events are concerned, the enlightenment of Buddha, the French Revolution, certainly the birth and death and resurrection of Christ have to count. But when it comes to combining process and event, few complexes have to matter more than the call of Abraham and his response.
Even today newspeople speak of the "Abrahamic faiths": Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which trace themselves back to Abraham. Thousands of years after the story first was told, millions -- up toward half the human race -- measure themselves by the question of how they relate to this story, this call, this response.
Picture, if you will: What would such a call look like? Did it come in the form of a dream? Why should Abraham trust that? Was there a voice? How would one separate that voice from those heard by people with paranoid schizophrenia? What could have been going on in Abraham's mind? What did the neighbors think? We can only imagine what might have gone on to give rise to this version of the story.
Once it is told, however, we have little choice but to take a stand in the light of its point. From now on, we are to be blessed if we stay close to the promise to Abraham. Nothing can be worse for a person or a people than to stand over against Abraham, the promise, and Abraham's benign Caller.
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
The story of Abraham gets pressed upon modern Christian congregations not only because they are identified, along with Jews, as children of Abraham (not always according to the flesh") but because Paul and other New Testament writers take up
the issue of the man who responded to God's call, left all, and started at a new place.
Paul introduces a new idea, even though he picks up on an old one (from Genesis 15:6). The word that presses the new idea is "justified." Never take knowledge of that word for granted. Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Barth, and the men and women who comment on faith today all have to unpackage the texts that use the term, rearrange the contents, and apply them to life today.
I can "justify" the margins of what I type, and make them come out right. I can "justify" my actions and hope my spouse will understand them. But Abraham could not "justify" himself, making things come out right on the margins of life or making a good defense of himself at the center of life.
No, as Paul reads Genesis and speaks about it to the Romans, everything, everything is cast to the side of God, the character and action of God. So long as anything, anything, is left on the side of Abraham, the ancestor of people of faith, there is no security for anyone. Abraham "believed God, and was reckoned to him as righteousness."
Credit Abraham with something on his side? He believed. In a way each revisiting of this text is a call to belief, not so that the hearer gets credit for responding, but so that she enjoys the benefits of the new relationship to God. That is what responding to the promise and call means now.
John 3:1-17
Sometimes a preacher ransacks a text, looks at each molecule of ink, measures the lines, hoping to find something about which to preach, something that will reward probing and, when expounded, stick in the minds of hearers. There are other days when a text is so rich one can only touch it.
Part of the richness this time is John 3:16, which has become a kind of mantra or icon, a text to be bannered on unfurlable tablecloth paper in end zones at football games, where television viewers cannot miss it. Yes, any attention to "God so loved the world ..." has to be rewarding.
Yet if one is to find some common theme in the texts today, the accent should fall on the call to faith given Nicodemus, who is here a kind of stand-in for or successor to Abraham, "a leader of the Jews." However the call came to Abraham, now it is voiced through Jesus, in simple, stark terms.
Just as John 3:16 has become a kind of magic slogan, so the phrase "born again" (in some translations of v. 3) often sounds like a mantra, a shibboleth, and becomes a kind of magic marker of who's in and who's out. This text allows for stress on that subject, too. But debates over what that can mean could preempt the space and time one should give to the theme: What do you think of Jesus? What do you do to respond to his call?
The exchange with Nicodemus is rather brusque. Here is not the gentle Jesus but the confrontational one. Packaging Jesus as the sweet inviter does not do justice to the starkness of the demand that comes with his person and work. But we do congregations a disservice to leave things there in the unrelieved either/or of demand. The final word: the world is to be "saved" through the Son. Part of that world is listening this week.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Genesis 12:1-8
What has hope got to do with repentance?
Ordinarily, repentance has a negative cast. It is regret, sorrow, the morning after feeling following a raucous night before. The only thing hopeful about it is the resolutions never to let it happen again. Yet even those are tinged with the realization that it has happened again and probably will again. Luther used to say that sinners shouldn't make vows -- in the end, we just add the lie to other forms of culpability.
But Genesis 12:1-8 is a different story. After 11 chapters of increasingly overwhelming hopelessness, here there is a new beginning. Everything in the story, including the repentance, depends on the hope moving in it.
Biblical critics commonly regard Genesis 1-11 as a separate unit, taking the twelfth chapter as the beginning of Abram or Abraham's saga. In this context, the refrain, "and God saw that it was good," has an ironic ring. For the story is of spreading disaster: Adam and Eve's rebellion; the murder of Abel; Lamech's song of revenge (4:23ff.); angels seducing women (6:1-4); the flood, preceded and followed by God's judgment that the human heart has become inherently evil (6:11-12, 8:20, where the NRSV softens with "inclination" what the RSV translated more accurately, "evil only continuously from [his] youth"); Noah's drunkenness and violation; and then the story of the tower of Babel. By the time it ends, the only sign of hope left in the narrative is the appearance of Abram and Sarai's names.
Yet hope can hang on such a thin thread, especially given the movement in Genesis 12. Just as God's memory of Noah saved humanity from destruction, so here God's choice of Abram and Sarai is the beginning of a new nation, descendents by blood first of all and then, in Christ, Gentiles grafted into the promise by his blood. Amidst the violence and destruction, the cries for retribution and self-aggrandizement, this promise rides like the ark or like Abram and Sarai as their camels trudged northwesterly.
The words of repentance are as understated as the story of the trip itself: "... and they set forth for the land of Canaan" (v. 5b). Like the man in the parable who stumbled across a hidden treasure and hustled off to buy the field (Matthew 13:44), Abram and Sarai left behind what had previously defined them: lands, family position, roots and futures. Possessed by the promise, they found no alternative, but up and left.
If hope doesn't drive repentance, it stalls out in self-reproaches and recriminations, ending in despair. But when the promise gets the reins, when in the midst of spreading disaster God takes hold with the gospel, then repentance is as natural and enjoyable as letting go of whatever is in the way. That's the real thing, a genuine Lent.
We know some outcomes. Abraham believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. He came to a land of promise (though he never "owned" more of it than the grave site of his wife). Paul believed, and found this story, this call, this response. it a life's calling to urge others to depend on the promise of God. But as for Nicodemus? The Fourth Gospel gives us excerpts of Jesus' words, but nothing more of Nicodemus, after his opening comment and question. Jesus speaks, and then we read only, "After this Jesus and his disciples went ...."
Did Nicodemus respond? Did he come to faith? What did he think after he went back into the shadows and then to the workaday world? Assume that this story is told to promote faith and questioning in our own time. Nicodemus becomes easier to identify with than Abraham and Paul, heroes of faith in the story of faith.
Nicodemus is left with the question: Who is this God who sends a Son, who announces a kingdom, who wants us to be born "from above," who wants to save the world and not condemn it? Whoever walks away with messages based on any of the three of these texts is supposed to be free from reliance on what she or he had invented and called a kingdom, of "works" that are never enough. Free from, yes. But, more important, free for the life God lets unfold.
Grist For The Mill
Genesis 12:1-4a
History has had room and time for only a few turning points. The invention of agriculture, of the village, of modern industrialism would count as three of these. Yet they were processes more than events. No one woke up one day and said, "Today we invented agriculture," or "Tomorrow let's produce industrialism."
So far as events are concerned, the enlightenment of Buddha, the French Revolution, certainly the birth and death and resurrection of Christ have to count. But when it comes to combining process and event, few complexes have to matter more than the call of Abraham and his response.
Even today newspeople speak of the "Abrahamic faiths": Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which trace themselves back to Abraham. Thousands of years after the story first was told, millions -- up toward half the human race -- measure themselves by the question of how they relate to this story, this call, this response.
Picture, if you will: What would such a call look like? Did it come in the form of a dream? Why should Abraham trust that? Was there a voice? How would one separate that voice from those heard by people with paranoid schizophrenia? What could have been going on in Abraham's mind? What did the neighbors think? We can only imagine what might have gone on to give rise to this version of the story.
Once it is told, however, we have little choice but to take a stand in the light of its point. From now on, we are to be blessed if we stay close to the promise to Abraham. Nothing can be worse for a person or a people than to stand over against Abraham, the promise, and Abraham's benign Caller.
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
The story of Abraham gets pressed upon modern Christian congregations not only because they are identified, along with Jews, as children of Abraham (not always according to the flesh") but because Paul and other New Testament writers take up
the issue of the man who responded to God's call, left all, and started at a new place.
Paul introduces a new idea, even though he picks up on an old one (from Genesis 15:6). The word that presses the new idea is "justified." Never take knowledge of that word for granted. Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Barth, and the men and women who comment on faith today all have to unpackage the texts that use the term, rearrange the contents, and apply them to life today.
I can "justify" the margins of what I type, and make them come out right. I can "justify" my actions and hope my spouse will understand them. But Abraham could not "justify" himself, making things come out right on the margins of life or making a good defense of himself at the center of life.
No, as Paul reads Genesis and speaks about it to the Romans, everything, everything is cast to the side of God, the character and action of God. So long as anything, anything, is left on the side of Abraham, the ancestor of people of faith, there is no security for anyone. Abraham "believed God, and was reckoned to him as righteousness."
Credit Abraham with something on his side? He believed. In a way each revisiting of this text is a call to belief, not so that the hearer gets credit for responding, but so that she enjoys the benefits of the new relationship to God. That is what responding to the promise and call means now.
John 3:1-17
Sometimes a preacher ransacks a text, looks at each molecule of ink, measures the lines, hoping to find something about which to preach, something that will reward probing and, when expounded, stick in the minds of hearers. There are other days when a text is so rich one can only touch it.
Part of the richness this time is John 3:16, which has become a kind of mantra or icon, a text to be bannered on unfurlable tablecloth paper in end zones at football games, where television viewers cannot miss it. Yes, any attention to "God so loved the world ..." has to be rewarding.
Yet if one is to find some common theme in the texts today, the accent should fall on the call to faith given Nicodemus, who is here a kind of stand-in for or successor to Abraham, "a leader of the Jews." However the call came to Abraham, now it is voiced through Jesus, in simple, stark terms.
Just as John 3:16 has become a kind of magic slogan, so the phrase "born again" (in some translations of v. 3) often sounds like a mantra, a shibboleth, and becomes a kind of magic marker of who's in and who's out. This text allows for stress on that subject, too. But debates over what that can mean could preempt the space and time one should give to the theme: What do you think of Jesus? What do you do to respond to his call?
The exchange with Nicodemus is rather brusque. Here is not the gentle Jesus but the confrontational one. Packaging Jesus as the sweet inviter does not do justice to the starkness of the demand that comes with his person and work. But we do congregations a disservice to leave things there in the unrelieved either/or of demand. The final word: the world is to be "saved" through the Son. Part of that world is listening this week.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Genesis 12:1-8
What has hope got to do with repentance?
Ordinarily, repentance has a negative cast. It is regret, sorrow, the morning after feeling following a raucous night before. The only thing hopeful about it is the resolutions never to let it happen again. Yet even those are tinged with the realization that it has happened again and probably will again. Luther used to say that sinners shouldn't make vows -- in the end, we just add the lie to other forms of culpability.
But Genesis 12:1-8 is a different story. After 11 chapters of increasingly overwhelming hopelessness, here there is a new beginning. Everything in the story, including the repentance, depends on the hope moving in it.
Biblical critics commonly regard Genesis 1-11 as a separate unit, taking the twelfth chapter as the beginning of Abram or Abraham's saga. In this context, the refrain, "and God saw that it was good," has an ironic ring. For the story is of spreading disaster: Adam and Eve's rebellion; the murder of Abel; Lamech's song of revenge (4:23ff.); angels seducing women (6:1-4); the flood, preceded and followed by God's judgment that the human heart has become inherently evil (6:11-12, 8:20, where the NRSV softens with "inclination" what the RSV translated more accurately, "evil only continuously from [his] youth"); Noah's drunkenness and violation; and then the story of the tower of Babel. By the time it ends, the only sign of hope left in the narrative is the appearance of Abram and Sarai's names.
Yet hope can hang on such a thin thread, especially given the movement in Genesis 12. Just as God's memory of Noah saved humanity from destruction, so here God's choice of Abram and Sarai is the beginning of a new nation, descendents by blood first of all and then, in Christ, Gentiles grafted into the promise by his blood. Amidst the violence and destruction, the cries for retribution and self-aggrandizement, this promise rides like the ark or like Abram and Sarai as their camels trudged northwesterly.
The words of repentance are as understated as the story of the trip itself: "... and they set forth for the land of Canaan" (v. 5b). Like the man in the parable who stumbled across a hidden treasure and hustled off to buy the field (Matthew 13:44), Abram and Sarai left behind what had previously defined them: lands, family position, roots and futures. Possessed by the promise, they found no alternative, but up and left.
If hope doesn't drive repentance, it stalls out in self-reproaches and recriminations, ending in despair. But when the promise gets the reins, when in the midst of spreading disaster God takes hold with the gospel, then repentance is as natural and enjoyable as letting go of whatever is in the way. That's the real thing, a genuine Lent.
